After Emmett Till, African American Lynchings Continue Unabated

The 14-year-old
African American boy from Chicago was killed in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28,
1955.

I know his
story by heart; it was the first one I learned on domestic terrorism and mob
lynching when I began my personal study of African American history.

He went to
visit relatives, a kind of summer vacation, and was accused of whistling at a
socially colored white woman.

Sexual
harassment, rape, whistling at a so-called white woman are all the same for
these domestic terrorists and all common themes in the murder of African
American men.

Emmett’s death
spoke to the historical and hysterical fear of cross-cultural relationships
despite the common knowledge of the rape of African and later African American
women by their European American oppressors, the “tainting of the pure white
race” and the myth of inherent inferiority for those socially colored black.

The two were
never to meet, mingle or mix. Death was not considered a high price but the
necessary cost of admission to race and its capitalist superiority complex.

It was deemed
necessary to maintain these pseudo-distinctions and color-coded divisions.

Emmett – not
his murderers – had crossed the line for whistling at her. It was a common
charge, included with those recorded by the Equal Justice Initiative like:

“Not
allowing a [socially colored] white person to beat him in a fight,” as was the
case of Jim Eastman in Brunswick, Tennessee, in 1887.

For
“refusing to abandon their land to [socially colored] white people,” William
Stephens and Jefferson Cole are lynched in Delta County, Texas, in 1895.

“For
complaining about the recent lynching of her husband, Haynes Turner, Mary
Turner was lynched with her unborn child at Folson Bridge at the Brooklyn-Lowndes
County line in Georgia in 1918.”

Thousands of
lynchings. Perhaps Emmett’s murderers didn’t think that his would matter.

But they were
wrong. Emmett’s heinous death would change the trajectory of a nation.

Persons said
his name and realized that their lives mattered, that if persons could beat and
lynch and shoot and tie a child’s body to a cotton gin fan and throw him into
the river and not be found guilty of a crime against our shared humanity, then
justice was not blind but looking the other way.

It inspired the
civil rights movement and a man named Martin Luther King Jr., who, on the eighth
anniversary of Till’s death, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963.

He had a dream:
“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But the
nightmare of race continues, and his children aren’t getting any younger.

Race and
racialized identities continue to inspire the lynching of African American men,
women and children in police states for suspected crimes like selling cigarettes
for which Eric Garner was choked to death, for listening to loud music as was
the case for Jordan Davis or simply walking back to his father’s home from a
convenience store like Trayvon Martin.

From chants of
“I am somebody” to “Black Lives Matter,” we are living the history of our days.

We are stuck in
the past, never to see a brighter day or the light at the end of our tunnel
vision because we human beings refuse to stick together.

It should have
never happened to Emmett Till but when it did, it should have never happened
again.

The struggle to
share our humanity continues. What will you do to change the present on this
day?

Editor’s note: A version
of this article first appeared on Thomas’ blog, Raceless Gospel. It is
used with permission.